


Siúil, siúil, siúil, a rúin

by Lilliburlero



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: 1798, A Volatile Kerryman, Catholicism, Duelling, Irish Language, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 22:31:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11000364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Stephen Maturin and James Dillon have a certain carnal compatibility. But in the end, it doesn't count for much.





	Siúil, siúil, siúil, a rúin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).



Stephen loved sexual importunacy, in man or woman. His preference in the manner of its expression was somewhat unfortunate: for women to dominate over him, for men to yield. Approaching now the years at which man's third age gives upon the fourth, he doubted that he would ever find a woman who was both attracted to his meagre person and bold enough to use him as he desired; the other inclination, however, was amply answered in James Dillon, who cared not if the man who fucked him had spindle shanks, a pinched face and sparse, greasy black hair, as long as he fucked him hard and frequently.

Were the occasion less grave, it would have pleased Stephen also to have wielded the power of a pressing, inescapable appointment. Whenever James bustled to join a ship, Stephen felt consigned to cap and petticoats, languishing and repining with a cheap favour at his breast. But there was a distinct, if slender, possibility that this time their parting might be final, never again to meet on earth. He couldn’t altogether relish it. 

James lay on his belly, propping his chin on one hand. His glorious hair was tumbled and tangled, furrowed and darkened with sweat. The smooth line of his back gave gracefully onto a firm, squarish rump, his milky redhead’s skin marred by a patch of angry pimples where his right buttock met the thigh. 

As Stephen made to rise, James turned his head and raised his left foot coquettishly. ‘Must you go now? You want me again, I know you do.’ 

‘I must be at Slane by dusk.’ Stephen reached for the shirt and drawers thrown over the footboard of the bed. 

‘Plenty of time. Depending on how long you mean to spend closeted with your shady—I mean, ghostly—father on Merchant’s Quay.’ 

He pulled his shirt over his head, glad it hid his face. ‘No time at all. What use would it do, to add a bad confession to my other sins?’ 

James’s impudent grin was replaced by a very sincere frown; did he but know it, it was an expression far less resistible. ‘What do you mean?’ 

‘I cannot very well confess,’ Stephen stepped into his smalls, and holding them up with one hand, gestured about the mean lodging-house chamber, ‘all this.’ 

‘But a confessor’s confidence is absolute, isn’t it?’ 

‘ _James_ , dear creature. A penitent must be, well, penitent. And I am not. I am most heartily unsorry.’ 

‘Then you are a cock.’ James rolled over and stroked his own homonymous part in emphasis. 

‘What? Oh— _praeter mulierem gallumque_? Sure, I have shown you I am not the former.’ 

‘Show me again.’ 

Stephen was sorely tempted, though the ache in his balls as his prick stirred told him he was all but drained. To strip again, to climb upon the bed and upon James, to bite and bruise the fine skin of his neck; to pin him down during the act of _fellatio_ , to pull his hair and slap his arse while frigging between his lean, strong thighs, all these would be agreeable pastimes for a man who, if he were to die on the morrow, would die excommunicate. 

‘I will not, for shame.’ 

But he dithered fatally. James sat up and seized his wrist; Stephen allowed himself to be pulled onto the bed at his side. 

‘You, Maturin, are a Papist with the soul of a canting Antrim weaver.’ 

‘I can’t help it. It’s the Huguenot strain.’ 

James laughed and grasped the nape of Stephen’s neck, drawing their lips together. James was a great proficient at the inflaming kiss, in its mixture of assertion and surrender hinting of more sensual delights to come, but the stale, rotten-sweet exhalation from his mouth had overcome whatever freshening agent, parsley or mint or clove, he had earlier employed. James suffered most terribly with his teeth, and Stephen pitied him, once to the point of degrading himself to do him the office of a barber-surgeon, but one could easier kiss a murderer, or an—an _informer_ than a person with foul breath. He ducked his head to one side and nipped at the tender flesh of James’s throat. The contusions from his recent and more savage assaults had already grown livid; it excited him, to see how easily James’s thin skin marked and tore. That was mere perversion, Stephen thought, a simpler inversion in its way than a desire for congress with one's own sex. He should make a note on it, except it was not the sort of thing, even heavily encrypted, that any man would want to stand as the last entry in his journal. Damn Corrigan—such foolish words, he could barely resent them, except resent them was exactly what he, a gentleman, must. 

James’s hand had found Stephen’s aching prick and was rubbing it to some kind of tumescence through his smallclothes. That abominable laundry, in roughening his never-fine linen to the approximate condition of glass-paper, had done him some unwitting service: the chafing fell just to the right side of the curious, wavering line drawn between the exquisite and the excruciating. Suddenly it crossed to the wrong one, and he gasped, fumbling with the string of his drawers. The action of scrambling out of them and his shirt mitigated urgency, and he returned to James’s arms simply to lie in them, his head on James’s shoulder, their legs entwined, savouring the contact of skin upon which a coital fume more than once had been whipped up and dried off. 

‘I wish you’d let me accompany you, Stephen.’ 

‘Your sense of honour is entirely too lively for such a dreary matter, a rúin. I am reasonably confident of life. I hope it is not self-conceit to say that had Corrigan any report of me, he would have taken back his remark, and having been apprised that low stature and ill looks are no necessary bar to a tolerable aim, may still do so.’ 

‘And so you must have that tepid Englishman to your second, to negotiate a withdrawal.’ 

‘I must surely. Anything else would be to plot murder.’ Stephen did not feel the self-assurance this statement proclaimed. Corrigan's buffoonery was of the sort inscrutable to rational man; it made him dangerous. 

James’s chest heaved in almost asthmatic fashion; he took a couple of shallow, wheezing breaths. Looking up, Stephen saw that his eyes were closed tight, his lips pressed into an ugly, trembling ridge; so small and neat were his features that the effect was infantile to a most unsettling degree. Stephen wriggled his shoulders and hips, signalling a wish to detach himself; petulantly, James tore his arm from around Stephen’s neck and curled into a foetal ball. 

Stephen stood up and collected his linen once more. ‘The Committee meets in a fortnight,’ he said, idiotically. ‘At Rathfarnham. I’ll see you there.’ 

James did not reply. Stephen peered at the chimney-piece clock. Nearly two, and he must pass by his lodgings to collect his bag before going to the livery stable, then thirty-five miles to ride. If the going was good, though, he would make it to the inn at Slane by fall of dark. He looked over, detached and without desire, at James’s trim, naked flank, as if he were a patient, or even a specimen. 

He was tying his stock when James spoke again, in a high unsteady voice, something muffled by his coiled posture. 'Siúil, siúil, siúil, a rúin, siúil go socair, siúil go dtí an doras, agus siúil go ciúin. Is go dté tú, mo mhúirnín, slán.' 

Stephen thrust his feet into his shoes, snatched his coat and fled. He was on the street before he realised that he had understood the forgotten words without any need inwardly to translate them.

**Author's Note:**

> 'praeter mulierem gallumque': except women and cockerels, the only animals who (according to Galen) don't suffer post-coital tristesse.
> 
> 'would die excommunicate': for Catholics, duelling was an excommunicable offence.
> 
> a rúin: literally 'my secret', idiomatically, 'my darling' or 'my dear'.
> 
> 'Siúil, siúil, siúil, a rúin, siúil go socair, siúil go dtí an doras, agus siúil go ciúin. Is go dté tú, mo mhúirnín, slán': Go, go, go, my [secret] love, go safely, go to the door and go quietly. Keep yourself safe, my darling, goodbye. Slightly adapted from the refrain of the popular macaronic song, 'Shule Aroon' (with additional thanks to Vealish for the National Teacher Exam Hall Irish Orthography.)


End file.
